Open Archaeology invites manuscripts for the Special Issue Digital Religioscapes: Current Methodologies and Novelties in the Analysis of Sacr(aliz)ed Spaces. The study of ancient religions—their materiality and practices—was subject to enormous changes, especially since different approaches from other disciplines, such as sociology, cultural studies, or anthropology, were made fruitful for the archaeology of ancient religions and subsequently enabled a qualitative approach to the research questions. This led to an understanding of religious spaces on the one hand as an outcome of social interaction, and on the other hand as a shared space with its own locally produced identity. However, the digital humanities have yet to find a meaningful way to integrate the resulting qualitative data into existing digital infrastructures and correlate it with quantitative data. The purpose of this special issue is to highlight the variety of methods when gathering, modelling/visualising, presenting, and analysing digital data and to discuss the diverse ways in which these heterogeneous methods and tools can be usefully combined. Approaches that use mixed data (qualitative and quantitative), such as Story Maps or Deep Map(ping) are discussed, as well as the advantages and disadvantages of various individual tools and applications, such as network models, cartograms, modelling of movement patterns, agent-based modelling, temporalities or sensoryscapes (soundscapes, smellscapes, viewsheds), to name a few. Since we are concentrating on the methodological approaches and applications for investigating religious spaces, the special issue is opened to case studies from a variety of chronological periods and geographical regions, reaching from the circum-Mediterranean to central Asia, and at least from the Iron Age until the Early Modern Period.
The authors are kindly invited to submit their contribution via the online submission system Editorial Manager available at: http://www.editorialmanager.com/opar/Default.aspx
We are looking forward to your submission between 15 February 2024
If you have any questions please contact Anaïs Lamesa (This email address is being protected from spambots. You need JavaScript enabled to view it.) or Katarzyna Inga Michalak (This email address is being protected from spambots. You need JavaScript enabled to view it.)
